The sense of an ending--a Carbon Based original

    It's December 22, the snow is falling, and I'm basking in relief that Mayan apocalypse fizzled.   A 5,125-year cycle in the Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar ended yesterday -- December 21, 2012.  Some New Age thinkers claimed that this date heralded a major spiritual transformation, the beginning of a new era, or the end of the earth in a collision with a planet or a black hole.

    Historians of Mayan culture scoffed at these internet-stoked rumors and theories, doubting that any authentic sources supported such a gaudy Hollywood interpretation. Astronomers were derisive about talk of black holes or planetary collisions. 

    These party poopers didn't stop hundreds of credulous souls from flocking to Merida in the Yucatan, near the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, and to Tikal in Guatemala. The photos look festive.

    There were casualties. In Sergeyev Posad, a village near Moscow, police blamed a retiree's suicidal leap from her apartment window on her Mayan-based fears. And Chinese authorities arrested around 1,000 members of the Church of the Almighty God for spreading tales about the supposed end times.

    Not for the first time, a calendar served as a screen for some people to project their fears of mortality.  The projection plays into our hardwired narrative bias -- we love stories with a beginning, middle and end.  The Mayan curtain rings down with a bang, and the story's ridiculous falsity didn't make it any less satisfying.

    By coincidence, last night I went to the documentary Chasing Ice, director Jeff Orlowski's chronicle of one photographer's attempt to grapple with a single aspect of a real catastrophe.  It's also one that doesn't lend itself readily to a simple narrative.

    The project began in 2005: The National Geographic sent photographer James Balog to document the impacts of climate change in Iceland.  Dubious about climate change before this trip, he saw enough to change his mind and to give him a mission:  He founded the Extreme Ice Survey to systematically photograph the disappearance of a number of Arctic glaciers using an array of time-lapse cameras.  His goal was to provide visual evidence to the world of the reality of climate change. 

    He surely succeeds. We witness two large calving events, in which a large chunk of the glacier face breaks off and floats away.   In Alaska, Greenland, and Iceland, we see moulins with melt water coursing away, and time-lapse sequences showing vast ice fields dwindling and slipping away.

    Another satisfaction to Orlowski's documentary lies in the courage and persistence of Balog and his crew.  They wrangle their cameras into the best position for their shots, or deal with technical failures in the harsh polar landscape.   They even have to redesign and replace the timing mechanism for many dozens of cameras, which costs them months of work.

    Balog rightly describes the images the Survey has collected as beautiful and horrifying. Of course, the visual evidence probably resonates most with those who already believe in climate change. It's unclear whether it will convince any denialists.  A YouTube video showed one self-described Fox News viewer declaring that she now believed in global warming as she left a showing of Chasing Ice, shaken by what she saw. But it's unclear whether the change of heart has lasted, and whether many others will follow her.  Certainly the most recently polling data shows that a sizeable minority of Americans continue to believe that climate change is a fraud, or at worst an overhyped issue.

    Climate change believers who aren't scientists probably exceed the numbers of those who believed in the Mayan apocalypse. Even so, along with evolution and reproductive health, climatology has been plunged into the cauldron where conservatives boil the science they hate.

    We suffer from cultural insanity when a New Age trifle like the Mayan apocalypse can command hours of airtime, while the screaming emergency created by greenhouse gas emissions scarcely rates a fraction of the sustained focus that it needs. As Balog points out, as a result of our own greenhouse gas emissions, we are approaching the end of a relatively benign and hospitable period for human habitation.  The stormy, wet, unstable future we are creating will contain threats whose contours are just coming into view.

    With his narrow focus, Balog attempts to counter the tide of denial and the unshapely vastness of climate change as a whole.  A dying glacier has a definite end point, and our love of story is mobilized when watching its death throes.  Struggling with climate change will be the work of centuries, and it will probably take forms we don't anticipate. It won't be a story with a satisfying arc, or even an ending.

A Mayan zodiac circle, shot by theilr, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Dust Bowl reflections-- a Carbon Based original

One way to address climate change today is to fully appreciate yesterday's climate disasters. The recent broadcast of Ken Burns' documentary on the Dust Bowl is a starting point, if an often annoying one. Plaintive violins and banjos keep the nostalgia turned up high.  The personality-focused style of these shows often blunts general insights and muffle the sharp points that need to be kept in mind.   But at least the talking heads in "The Dust Bowl" were explicit in stating that the catastrophe was manmade, like today's climate change woes.

The story is a familiar blend of fragile prospertiy, delusional hope and harsh comeuppance. The Homestead Act after the Civil War lured growing numbers of farmers onto semiarid grasslands, with few trees and little water.  A period of higher than normal rainfall masked the consequences of this influx for a while.  Many Plains dwellers believed that the wetter weather was permanent. 

Policy choices played a destructive role in adding to the risks. "Rain follows the plow" was the dunderheaded motto used to promote the settlement.  Free or cheap land and price supports for wheat during World War I led to good years that attracted more immigrants. By this time, most residents were deeply attached to the land.

During these fat years, deep plowing destroyed the millions of acres of grasses that held the soil in place, and brought marginal land under cultivation. Fields were often left bare, without cover cropping despite the constant winds.  Topsoils dried up even before the drought returned, which was the prelude to the apocalyptic dust storms of the 1930s.

When the rain stopped and the dust storms came, most people in the area underestimated the dangers.  They said, "We've seen droughts before, we've seen dust storms before," even though the storms of the 1930s were larger and longer lasting. Moving away seemed unthinkable.   As the market for wheat collapsed and the drought worsened, most farmers were loath to see their own part in fomenting the disaster.  Just leave us alone, they said, and the rains will come back, and things will return to normal. 

But the drought got worse. One farmer lamented, "One of those years, we put our entire wheat crop in one wagon."  Children and the elderly sickened and died from "dust pneumonia."

The exodus from the Dust Bowl eventually picked up after more than five years of no money and no crops.  "A migration of the defeated," the narrator intoned, it dwarfed the 19th century US migrations, but it's largely gone from public notice. 

Several of witnesses summoned by Burns showed some insight into the problem. Bernard Lewis, a child at the time, said, "We always had hope that next year was going to be better... we learned slowly." These hopes were cruelly shredded in the years of depression and dust, only to return in a blink when conditions improved.

In the last few minutes of part two of the "The Dust Bowl," various interviewees acknowledged the need for humility and for staying mindful of the land's limits and needs.  But the script did little to explain the predictable market failures that  worsened tolerable natural cycles into outright catastrophe.

The government's response was a mixed bag. Short-term, the Works Progress Administration in 1935 launched projects that, though they were condemned as make work, nevertheless brought labor to the region and helped busted farmers. More scientific agriculture was brought to bear on the problem, with contour plowing and better erosion control replacing destructive land use habits of yore.  But the improvements were modest, and the government did little to slow down the the reintroduction of the same detrimental practices once the rains returned.   In the 1940s, overplanting and developing marginal land resumed quickly. Smaller dust storms returned in the 1950s, held somewhat in check by the new methods.

Roosevelt may have brought hope to the region, but the political calculus left no room for the most sustainable measure in the long term -- leave the land alone, and avoid development where there isn't the water to support it.  We see a similar pattern happening today in the planting of crops for biofuel, and in the Great Plains today, in pumping ancient groundwater from the Ogallala Aquifer. One of the speakers estimates that only twenty years of water remain -- and then it's back to the drought cycle.

After the Dot Com bust after 2000, the Onion ran a headline:  "Americans angrily demand new bubble to invest in."   Maybe it's human nature. But it's worth resisting. The bad ecological outcomes of climate change that threaten us today are potentially much worse than the Dust Bowl.

FSA; Dust Storm; "Farmer and sons walking in the face of a dust storm"; Cimarron County, Oklahoma. Shot by Arthur Rothstein in 1936. This image gets a few minutes of its own in the Ken Burns documentary